Why Miley Cyrus Didn’t Follow Through on Her Original 2020 Album Plans
Singer Miley Cyrus debuted her latest single, “Midnight Sky,” after a year without a solo release. She initially set out to release an album in 2020, but there have been many adjustments along the way. Learn why Cyrus is more interested in dropping singles, and why she felt she had to alter course.
Cyrus released ‘She is Coming’ in 2019
Following 2017’s Younger Now, Cyrus switched gears. Releasing her EP She Is Coming, she announced that it was the first of three, followed by She Is Here and She Is Everything. The EPs would make up one album, titled She Is Miley Cyrus, scheduled to debut in 2020.
But that wasn’t how it worked out in the end. “I learned a lot in the last year that don’t make plans because things just constantly change,” Cyrus told Zane Lowe in an Apple Music interview. “It makes you feel like super stuck to structure and inflexible.”
Since then, she’s released only singles
Instead, Cyrus took to releasing singles. She dropped “Slide Away” in the days after announcing her separation from then-husband, actor Liam Hemsworth. A previously planned single off the Charlie’s Angels soundtrack, “Don’t Call Me Angel” (with Ariana Grande and Lana Del Rey) came a few weeks later.
After, she took nearly a year off, focusing on other projects and recovering from vocal surgery. But Cyrus realized that she preferred to releasing music this way. “I really have always enjoyed dropping singles rather than the full body of work [because] it allows you to talk to your fans in real-time,” she told Lowe.
Why Cyrus shifted gears with ‘Midnight Sky’
Enter Cyrus’ August 2020 single. “The way that I even wrote ‘Midnight Sky’ was I was prepping to create a video for another song,” she told Lowe. Cyrus added that when she first heard the track, she thought, “I gotta scratch everything and write this. This is the foundation on which I feel like I can lay my story on top of.”
“Kind of the way that this song came about, I was feeling like it didn’t make sense for me to continue the next two projects,” she continued. “I felt like for my life the way it evolves and constantly changes, the way I change, how public my experiences are, it doesn’t make sense for me to wrap up that body of time in just a few songs.”
What will be different about her upcoming album
So what will make it onto the final album? Cyrus said that she “worked for two years on this record,” meaning some of her She Is Coming tracks may join new music. But Cyrus says one thing she’s moved away from is her need to define herself through rebellion because she feels “so secure and whole.”
“I have all the respect and dignity that’s always been so important for me to claim,” she told Lowe. She continued, “I feel like by having that security, I don’t feel so rebellious or like I have anything to prove. I just have something to be, and that’s myself. And to, as a strong, powerful person, tell my story in the words that feel like the truth.”
